Remember the mashed potato? I don’t mean creamed or whipped potatoes or Mum’s lumpy ones, but just a simple floury russet mashed into submission, preferably with a fork and thus retaining its invaluable texture. I’ve never been served fork-mashed potatoes in a top resto in Toronto — although I know they are still being made at a one-star resto, Restaurant J-F Issaultier outside Nice, where I recently found a neat little square of mash holding up a slice of fish. But it isn’t just the fork-mashed that is slipping into oblivion. With the exception of the French fry, potatoes, the most versatile of all starches, are often MIA on smart menus. Instead, the fashionable starches are rice, quinoa, couscous, bulgar wheat, pasta. The potato it seems is old hat.

I mourn the passing of the potato at Luci where the menu seems, aside from the inevitable fry, entirely spud-free. Fernando Tenudo, the popular maitre d’ of Bistro 990 in its days as the celeb hub of the Toronto film festival, has brought his expansive style westward to The Queensway at Royal York. It’s a mod little place, trendy glass walls and minimalist furbishing. The chef is Filomena Pallozzi, formerly at Oro, and the menu is Club Med with add-ons. We start with nicely squashy gnocchi OD’ing in pesto ($15), and a torta del granchio ($12), a crab, shrimp, and scallop cake, very good, garnished with spicy tomato and avocado cream.

I spot pan-seared grouper, spring pea sauce ($22). So titillatingly simple. Must have it. I see it in my mind’s eye as a snowy white choice fin matched with magical peas. But then the grouper arrives on top of a mini-mountain of emerald quinoa with some pea sauce drooping around it, garnished with dehydrated sweet potato chips.

I almost throw my fork down in despair. What’s happened to unaffected cooking? I categorize Luci as a neighbourhood place and expect home cooking plus. Time was when home cooking had its own aesthetic, “good-tasting cooking” as a professional chef once described it to me and not entirely dismissively. I don’t suppose there was finer home cooking than during the Julia Child period, ’60s to ’80s, the great communicator inspiring cookbooks for every taste and skill. Only drawback: the demise of the leftover. Before the Child effect, people still had Sunday roasts and ate ’em up over the week. Who can now remember the pleasure of cold beef with pickled onions and a baked potato?

Of course, there wasn’t the Food Network then to excite the cook with the sight of her peers going bananas, so she wasn’t tempted to stretch herself and surprise the family with fenugreek, quinoa or duck foie gras ice cream, featured recently on Top Chef. Go further back: Can you imagine Mrs. Patmore, who rules the range on this season’s social arbiter Downton Abbey, sending up to the dining room the newfangled macaron, let alone pink peppercorn macarons (Top Chef again)? When her employer asked for the novel apple charlotte, now alas, passé, she flatly refused, saying she wanted to make the familiar favourite raspberry meringue. The guests were appalled to find she had dusted the dessert with salt instead of sugar. True, it was her failing eyesight driving these decisions, but today, Mrs. Patmore would be hailed as the newest sensation, awarded top spot on Top Chef as a spicemeister.

I’m sure that Pallozzi is a good cook who, however, has been led astray by the-more-bizarre- the-better movement, where every aspiring cook wants to stun eaters rather than please them. Pork tenderloin ($20), has been prepared not so much by a cook as a stylist, three thick overcooked rounds arranged artistically with (finally!) potatoes. But cruelly underroasted, far too many red and green peppers, eggplant, and … is that a mushroom? We had an uninspired cheese plate ($12), and the failsafe sticky toffee cake ($9). Good red Portugese house wine ($25). Service: long wait for second course.

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